The supposed boundary between representation and reality dissolves because both sides are representation

Evidence

The extent of the processes of representation begins to reveal the elusiveness of their apparently simple structural effect. The structure of meaning in a system of representation arises, it is suggested, from the distinction maintained between the realm of representation and the external reality to which it refers. Yet this real world, outside the exhibition, seems actually to have consisted only of further representations of the real. Just as the imitations in the exhibition were marked with traces of the real (were the natives on display not real people?), so the reality outside was never quite unmediated. Colonising Egypt is not concerned so much with this necessary elusiveness, but with the question of how it comes to be overlooked. How does the colonising process extend the world-as-exhibition, supplanting with its powerful metaphysic other less effective theologies? — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 37

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The recursiveness here — the ‘real’ turns out to be only more representations — is a dense, unsettling move that resists quick summary and repays sitting with.
• QUESTION: The closing question — how does the world-as-exhibition supplant other theologies — is the book’s engine and worth chasing through the chapter bodies.
• XREF: connects to: Representation makes the new appear predetermined and therefore old; Delusion claims equal rights with truth because both involve imagination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153; The divine-human union manifests only once and must pass from sensory to representational space — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 838 (+1 more)